Would you be happier if you were off of Facebook? This Dutch nonprofit initiative has created a website, 99 days of freedom, and is asking people to try their own experiment.

My own kids left FB years ago. On their own. They felt like the fights, the gossip and the drama was not worth it. All three of them say they are quite happy to not be on Facebook. Most of their friends are not on anymore either. The young people who still use it, tell me it for family and to keep in touch with their grandparents and family. How they use it has changed dramatically. The young people I am speaking with are college age and high school. Most of them use Instagram and snapchat to communicate now. Facebook paid one billion dollars for Instagram in 2012, so they found a way to get back and keep those kids who have migrated to Instagram.

Do you ever wonder what life is like without Facebook?In response to Facebook’s controversial mood experiment involving some 700,000 unwitting users, we present you 99 Days of Freedom; an online study on how life without Facebook impacts user happiness. Joining is very simple: follow our three step instruction to join the experiment for as long as you like. We can’t wait to hear how you spend your time off.Visit the website here.

The “99 Days of Freedom” initiative was dreamed up by employees at Just B.V., a creative agency in the Netherlands. It started as an office joke.

“Like a lot of Facebook users, many of us were bothered by reports of secret mood experiments,” Just’s art director, Merijn Straathof, said in a press release. “As we discussed it internally, we noted an interesting tendency: To a person, everyone had at least a ‘complicated’ relationship with Facebook. Whether it was being tagged in unflattering photos, getting into arguments with other users or simply regretting time lost through excessive use, there was a surprising degree of negative sentiment. Then someone joked, ‘I guess that the real question is, ‘How do you feel when you don’t use Facebook?’ There was group laughter, followed by, ‘Wait a second. That’s a really good question!”

Just chose 99 days because it thought users would lose interest if the campaign ran longer and it would be hard to measure emotional change if it was shorter. Straathof stressed the goal isn’t to protest Facebook or undermine its business. “Facebook is an incredible platform, we’re all fiercely loyal users and we believe that there’s a lot to love about the service,” he said.

As of early Friday morning, more than 6,000 people had signed up for the campaign, which was announced on Wednesday. That’s barely a drop in Facebook’s billion-user bucket.

Even if the campaign called for leaving Facebook altogether, would it work? Cornell University conducted a survey which it published in 2013 showing a quarter of Facebook users take breaks from the site by deactivating their account, and one in 10 completely quit. The survey was based on responses from 410 people – not exactly representative of Facebook’s much larger user base.

However there were some interesting results. The researchers found that Facebook users who deactivate their account are more likely to know someone else who has also deactivated – perhaps a sign that if enough people get mad at Facebook, a mass exodus could occur.

But mass exodus would mean overcoming the network effect. That would be tough. People might be mad at Facebook, but it’s still the site people use to catch up with friends and family. You can’t just leave it for another site because your friends aren’t on another site – they’re on Facebook. Even if you quit Facebook, you might be using another network it owns like Instagram or What’s App.

But plenty of alternative social networks are out there – some popping up just in time to capitalize on anti-Facebook rage. Sobrr is one such Facebook alternative. In a way, it’s the anti-Facebook. Instead of tracking everything you do, the site erases everything every 24 hours.

Erasing everything is a promise we’ve heard before. Remember Snapchat’s supposed commitment to privacy? Users were told photos and videos sent through the app would disappear within ten seconds, but it turned out they were being saved without users’ knowledge.

In many ways, Facebook owns you. When you clicked that little TOS box, (terms of service), you agreed to let Facebook use your content and photos. Now they have done something that I feel is ethically wrong. You and your friends, and followers may of been part of an experiment conducted by manipulating your feeds. Facebook manipulated over 683,000 of it’s users feeds to see how people reacted to either positive or negative posts from their friends. Conducting secret psychology experiment on users’ emotions. You can add this worry to your lack of control and privacy online with Facebook.

The article above is from the Telegraph, UK and it is quite detailed. If you would like to read it, it has what is known as a “paywall” in front of it. The work around for that is open your browser in privacy mode or with Chrome, it is called incognito, so that is a good tip for you today. How to read protected articles online.

Facebook manipulated peoples feeds. Then they then monitored the users’ response, to see whether their friends’ attitude had an impact on their own.

“When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.”

Facebook were able to carry out the experiment because all users have to tick a box agreeing to their terms and conditions. These include “internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.” So since you agree in the terms of service to basically whatever they want to do, you are powerless if you use Facebook. They also can use any of your photos anyway they want too. You do know that your profile and photo can be used in ads, right? To stop that from happening you have to select a certain set of privacy settings. Read the details on that here. How do you feel about having no control over your information or being used and manipulated in an experiment like this? I would like to hear from you.

If you feel like maybe it is time to leave Facebook here are directions on how to do that. How to leave facebook.

Facebook isn’t the only social media site to raise red flags for its handling of information recently. Buzzfeed has been accused of keeping user data gleaned from its popular quizzes, which are often shared on social media networks like Facebook.

Many Facebook users have little understanding of the way their personal data is used by the website, or what other parties may have access to that information. According to a Consumer Reports survey conducted before the experiment was reported, “only 37 percent of Facebook users say they have used the site’s privacy tools to customize how much information apps are allowed to see.”

It has emerged that Facebook first conducted research into the impact of posts on its users’ moods for 1,180 days between January 2009 and March 2012, look at the data of ‘all Facebook users in the 100 most populous US cities’, as reported by The Telegraph earlier this year. This just came out in the last few days. At first FB said it was only for one week! Obviously there is much more going on here than they want to tell the public.

They have manipulated your feeds to conduct a psychology experiment. How do you feel about that? Do you think this is ethical? They are treating their users like rats in a maze. I am not a fan of social media. I have always felt there are too many privacy rights at stake. In 1998 I was going to middle schools and high schools speaking to local PTA’s about online safety and myspace about how to keep your kids safe online. What I saw coming was a carelessness that people were showing by putting all kinds of personal information online. Today I never ceased to be amazed at how much people post online. Parent putting photos of their half naked kids on Instagram, and all social media. Their kids in the bath, in bathing suits and so forth. Bad idea- Mommy bloggers and parents and grandparents. Do you have any idea about the pedophiles and weirdos looking for photos like these of your kids and what they do with those photos? If these people could see that, and the dark world that is very real out there with the sickos, they would never do that again. That is just one aspect to worry about. Next came Google maps, showing photos of our homes, and cars and yards. Then we have all the underage kids using Facebook and very careless with it. They have no idea what they are putting out there and that fact is could haunt them for decades. In addition to the kids meeting older strange men that trolled for them online and so many stories like this today that are frighting. Everyone is responsible for what they put online and how they put out information. Facebook is a good networking tool, but if they are manipulating our communication and feeds with our followers, friends and business contacts, that is violating the spirit of what they do. This experiment was conducted in 2012, and the only reason it came out now, is the study was just published. I find this gravely disturbing. I would love to know how many other studies and what other manipulations have been going on with our Facebook accounts since then? Wouldn’t you? I am sure this was not a one time thing. We are all dollar signs to these social media companies. Now Facebook has share holders to answer too, and they need to make a profit. What do you think? If you are a Facebook user, how do you feel about the fact that it’s possible your posting feeds and your followers and those whom you may follow could be manipulated in this way by the company for research? Please leave a comment below.

Here is another great article I found on how to fix facebook privacy intrusion.

This is creating so much negative publicity that Facebook has a representative talking to the press.Here is some of what he is saying.

Adam Kramer, Facebook data scientist and co-author of the study, has posted an explanation of the motivation behind the research, which he says serves as Facebook’s statement on the matter.

“The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product,” says Kramer. “We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.”

“IN HINDSIGHT, THE RESEARCH BENEFITS OF THE PAPER MAY NOT HAVE JUSTIFIED ALL OF THIS ANXIETY.

Really? Ya think so? Does this statement give you any reassurance about Facebook and what they can do with your information and account? I would like to know how many more of these kind of “experiments” and research have been done since 2012. Because you know there are more. We already know they use our account for all kinds of advertising experiments, and I am sure much more than we know. It will be interesting to see what else comes light after this brouhaha.

Update: 7/4/2014 I have been keeping track of new articles with new viewpoints or that go deeper on this issue all week. This is not one of those stories that is dying down.Here is a list of stories with good information you may be interested in reading.

I officially officially declare that all search engine submission services are now scams. If you receive an email from anyone claiming to offer search engine submission services or a similar submission service–it is spam and also a scam.

Take a look at the UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email–spam) email that I received just recently, it looked like this:

The email is offering “search engine submission services” and the service, which costs a hefty $75.00 per year provides “submission and search engine ranking for domain owners”. The offer goes on to say:

Failure to complete your search engine registration by Nov 10, 2012 may result in the cancellation of this order (making it difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web).

Sure, they want you to reply and pay for their “service” by a certain date. But it is absolutely a false and misleading statement when they say that “it will make it “difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web”. That statement is not only misleading, it is WRONG. Let me make it very clear, here:

You do NOT have to submit your web site to the search engines. The search engines have been crawling and indexing web sites without any issues whatsoever for many years now. Submitting to search engines stopped being effective over 10 years ago. The best way to get your web site indexed properly in the search engines is to get links from other web sites to your web site. Furthermore, I have actually proven that within minutes of registering a new domain name, Google will visit your web site, in an attempt to crawl its pages and index the content. That’s without having to submit your URL to a search engine

Most of you who know me, know I have been part of the San Francisco Writers Conference for 10 years. A friend of mine asked me if I would like to volunteer , and I was so excited. The conference was then held at the St Francis Hotel, and I loved every minute of it.

Here is a photo of the volunteers for that year! 2005.
The only two from this photo who are still volunteering, are Kate Farrell, and myself. I am sure we are missing a few people in this photo. We have 75 volunteers, so it is a big crew. As the Volunteer Director, I must say our volunteers do an amazing job.
We could not put on this wonderful event without all of their help.
Kate is the current President of the Women’s National Book Association, SF Chapter, and I am the former President. The SFWC is how I discovered the WNBA-SF Chapter, which is an organization I love dearly. You can visit our table at the conference to learn more.

I look forward to this event every year. It feel like a class reunion. If you have never been to the conference, you are missing a great event.
If you cannot make it for the entire conference, we now offer classes that are open to anyone to sign up for on Thursday and Monday. Click here to view the schedule.

I will be teaching “WordPress for Newbies” on Monday. Enrollment is limited so sign up now.

WORDPRESS BOOT CAMP FOR NON-TECHIES – Fee: $99

Bring Your Laptop, Leave with a Blog | This course includes 10 instructional videos with unlimited access and no experation date. These videos cover all the basics and are there to help you learn and remember what we will work on in class.

Linda Lee, WordPress TotalTraining

You will receive the login to your WordPress test site before class. We will build your website together on the test site, and you will have access to the site for 90 days. The course requires a computer, preferably with a mouse. iPads and notepads are not the best choice. The course includes a video that covers the basics we work on together during the class. You will receive directions and a prep sheet when you sign up

You will learn:

How to set up a free WordPress website

The difference between self-hosted WordPress website?and a free one on WordPress.com

I love teaching people how to use WordPress, and no matter what your skill level, you will learn the basics by the time you leave.
Please join me on Feb 17th, at the Mark Hopkins Hotel for this half day class.

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Linda Lee has and continues to always go above and beyond and and all expectations. She has bailed me out more times than I can count, is easy to work with, timely, efficient and best of all – she is intuitive enough to understand and know what I want. Just an incredible person and I am thrilled to have her help on all my website and hosting questions.